Festivals are not for everyone. As the American singer Aimee Mann
once put it: "Personally, I hate being in the middle of a muddy field,
being constantly barraged by extremely loud music, along with several hundred
thousand screwed-up people and no toilet - but that's just me."

The image is familiar and everyone has their favourite horror story. But
even in the most trying conditions, there is nothing quite like the Great
British pop festival for prompting an outbreak of the Dunkirk spirit. One
of my most vivid memories of Glastonbury is of the year I ducked into one
of the big tents on the edge of the site to avoid yet another cloudburst
and came across Rolf Harris performing to a crowd of bedraggled souls. Having
conjured a mood of bonhomie that was little short of heroic, he launched
into a version of Lou Reed's Perfect Day. Several thousand voices joined
in, while rain sluiced off the canvas all around: pure heaven. For no matter
how commercially driven they have become, there is still a spiritual dimension
to the modern pop festival, a sense in which, even as the litter bins overflow
and the plastic beer glasses pile up, people feel that they are connecting
with a simpler, more bucolic way of life by standing about listening to
music in the great outdoors.

It's mostly nonsense, of course, but when pop festivals began in the 1960s
there was a lot of idealistic talk about the younger generation discovering
a new set of communal values and reclaiming some sort of mythical freedom,
a theme helpfully illustrated in the media by pictures of naked young women
(and occasionally men) frolicking near clear blue rivers and green fields.

In fact, the early festivals were nearly always a complete shambles with
sites that resembled refugee camps, little in the way of organised catering,
non-existent sanitation and timetables for the performances which were abandoned
before they were begun.

Nowadays festivals are much more professionally organised and events such
as V2001, The Carling Weekend and T in The Park function like well-oiled,
if sometimes rather dirty machines where you can catch as many acts in one
weekend as most people would expect to see in a year.